bri > bri's Quotes

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
Feel for yourself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. it was a fine cry -- loud and long -- but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I'm not senile," I snapped. "If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Those huge stars have lasted for millions of years by taking care never to absorb any of the fiery rays lovers all over the world send up at them night after night. To avoid that, the star generates so much heat inside itself that it shatters the rays into a thousand pieces.
Any look it receives is immediately repulsed, reflected back onto the earth, like a trick done with mirrors. That is the reason the stars shine so brightly at night.”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I’ve never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I’d want to feel the stars round my head. I’d want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That’s how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

“I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

“...the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Time is the cruelest force of all.”
― Cixin Liu, Death's End

“We'll send only a brain," he said.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”
― Lewis Carroll

“To my daughter I will say, when the men come, set yourself on fire.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“Sad people have the gift of time, while the world dizzies everyone else; they remain stagnant, their bodies refusing to follow pace with the universe. With these kind of people everything aches for too long, everything moves without rush, wounds are always wet.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“I belong deeply to myself.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“You're just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode. That's what you are, a bee charmer.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Your twisting is done--you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary...”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity